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Before and After Pictures of New Orleans and Surronding Areas
I've been stuck home ill for the past two days. I have to go to the intereet just to get away. The total devastation is enourmous and incomprehendable. Over 1 million people displaced for a long period of time.
Humbling really.
But is a real shame the people that are shooting at rescuers. They are just making it far worse. This is the US not Iraq!! WTF??!!
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Before and After Pictures of New Orleans and Surronding Areas
Nice rant! But you do have a good point. The whiners and complainers are doing nothing to help the victims but are working to help themselves. Sad... Sad the REd cross was kept out of New Orleans by the Govenor, yet it's George Bush's fault. I don't get it...
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Before and After Pictures of New Orleans and Surronding Areas
Got this off the news wire from a local TV station website. It discusses what the National Guard is finding when they do the house to house: large stashes of stolen goods.
NEW ORLEANS -- It was like a modern-day treasure map -- a computerized diagram of neighborhoods with codes marking the addresses where National Guard soldiers came upon caches of goods taken by looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"There's probably still loot out there" hidden in various homes, Capt. Gregg McGowan said from his Oklahoma National Guard unit's makeshift headquarters.
"We're not going house-to-house looking for it, but if we find it, we secure it so police can check it."
In the chaos that followed Katrina's flooding, looters targeted everything from grocery stores to gun shops to trendy women's clothing boutiques. Now that the city is mostly empty of civilians, military patrols making house-to-house checks for remaining residents or the dead are finding some of the hiding places for the stolen goods.
New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan said he intends to prosecute as many looters as he can. However, few arrests have been made thus far because authorities have been primarily concerned with reaching stranded residents, Jordan said.
The guardsmen recently thought they had caught a looter coming back into town to load his stash onto a moving truck. Inside his home, the soldiers found automobile parts stacked 8 feet high, a new off-road motorcycle and various electronics, including a video game system with a pawn shop ticket still attached.
But the man told the soldiers he had no idea where the goods came from and that someone else must have broken into his home and stashed them there after he evacuated. Skeptical, the soldiers detained him until police arrived, filled out a report and seized the goods. They took the man's name and address, but did not arrest him.
"You could be technical and say, 'I'm going to book him with possession of stolen property,' but then you have to find out who the owner is, find out whether that person had permission take that property," New Orleans Police Capt. Marlon Defillo said.
"So what we're generally doing is seizing the goods as found property and writing a report."
That way, he explained, authorities can return the goods if they figure out where they came from - rather than holding them as evidence pending the resolution of often drawn-out criminal cases.
In other homes, McGowan's unit found automatic teller machines that had been broken open and emptied of cash and bags of ammunition still packaged in 500-round bundles, not the individual boxes of 20 rounds usually sold over the counter.
A smashed-open video poker machine, likely taken from a bar, was left lying on the sidewalk of an Uptown residential street.
In a church-run assisted living home close to a heavily looted Wal-Mart in the lower Garden District, a team of guardsmen found new bicycles, stereos and clothing. Someone associated with the church, who refused to give his name, said at least seven rooms in the four-story residence were filled with goods believed to be stolen.
New Orleans police are storing seized loot in a makeshift warehouse near the city's train station, Defillo said. He declined to provide details on how many goods had been found, how many businesses or homes had been looted, or if authorities had any long-term plan to track down some of the culprits.
"We haven't even had time to deal with that yet," he said.
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Before and After Pictures of New Orleans and Surronding Areas
One of the things I must constantly remind myself is not everyone thinks along the same lines as I do. Like most members of this board, if I want a better life, I'm going to make a plan and then go after it. Be it more technical training, a better job, a degree or advanced degree, etc. It seems obvious to us. However, it's not obvious to everyone. Nor is every person out there willing to put in the effort to get ahead.
I rememebr when my dad told me over the phone "Sorry son, we're broke." So there I sat, middle of the college semester owing the university about $2k and no financial help coming in from the parents anymore. I made it happen through extra jobs, hard work, less sleep, etc. But that's not obvious to everyone. That's the hard part to keep in mind.
Given that situation, plenty of people would have dropped out with the "pity me" excuse and never finished. One of the biggest lessons I learned from finishing up school pretty much on my own was there is plenty of help out there...if you aren't an unmarried childless white male. But the key is you have to want to seek that out. You have to step up to the plate and make it happen. Seems obvious to me and many others. But it's not obvious to so many or they just don't want to put forth the effort.
I can be poor for 4 years and work my butt off. at the end of the 4 years I can be making $35k depending on career choise. Or I can take the easy road and make $8/hr working at McDonalds. After 4 years, I might be a shift supervisor making whatever that pay is, but probably less than $35k/year. Over the long haul, the time spent in school earning a degree or learning a trade will pay out more. Seems like an obvious choice, but it's not. You have to want it enough to actually do it.
I remember when Wisconsin changed it's welfare rules. The left screamed about people starving in the streets and mass homelessness. That didn't happen. People picked up and moved back to Chicago once their welfare benefits ran out in Wisconsin.
There are many different ways to look at this. Many of these people view the welfare check as an entitlement. I'm entitled to it for existing so where's MY money? Give my check, whitey. Instead of taking advantage of all the scholarship and education programs created to offset and correct the wrongs of racism, they feel they are entitled to collect a check for just existing. They come from a compact slum where everyone is out for themselves. Anyone trying to help is just a sucker to be taken advantage of. Different lifestyle and one I and many others don't understand, but then these people don't understand our lifestyles. It works both ways.
My point in rambling on is there are different sides and I must constantly remind myself of this. I have to do that in my job. What seems obvious to me doesn't get through others. When I visited a warehouse, I was trying to make changes and improvements. We need the people to do their jobs correctly. Seems obvious? Wrong. Some people just don't care, they are putting in the time necessary collect the check. It's a foreign attitude for me. But I must remind myself that it exists and it's what I have to work with.
It's easy to bash the people of NEw Orleans and I've doneit myself. Is it embarrassing for those images to br broadcast across the world? Yes. But we have very different groups of people in the US just like everywhere else. Germany and France have those working to get ahead. But they also have those that take advantage of a very generous welfare system. So why work hard when I can live good enough for me by collecting a check from the state? "Where's my check?" Really no different from the US.
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09-01-2005, 16:56 
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